A bald Englishman with 4.5 million YouTube subscribers and a fondness for crumbling Soviet mosaics has just published his definitive ranking of every country that once made up the USSR. The video, released today, runs for 30 minutes and reads, on the surface, like a personal travel diary. Underneath, it is something more useful: a price list for 15 economies that almost no mainstream travel guide bothers to compare.
Benjamin Rich, who films under the name Bald and Bankrupt, built a 705-million-view media business by walking into post-Soviet towns most economists have never heard of and asking pensioners how much their groceries cost. His ranking, which he insists is "purely personal," is in fact a remarkably clean read on which of these 15 economies are open, which are closed, and which charge tourists the equivalent of Monaco prices for the privilege of being followed by secret police. The winner, Belarus, currently sits under heavy Western sanctions. The loser, Turkmenistan, has an official exchange rate that is roughly 11 times stronger than the rate locals actually use. The gap between those two facts is the entire story.
The background
The 15 countries Rich ranked were carved out of the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991. Thirty-five years later, they have followed wildly different economic paths. Three of them - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - joined the European Union and the euro. Others, like Russia and Belarus, doubled down on state control. A few, including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, opted for closed-off authoritarian economies built on natural gas and cotton.
For travellers, the most important variable is something economists call the parallel exchange rate - the unofficial price of foreign currency on the black market, which appears in countries where the government fixes the official rate at a level that does not reflect reality. When official and unofficial rates diverge sharply, a tourist who changes money at a bank is essentially paying a hidden tax. A tourist who finds a back-room money changer pays the real price.
The other variable is visa policy - the rules that decide whether a foreigner can enter the country at all, and what it costs them. Closed economies tend to layer visas with mandatory tour guides, hotel restrictions, and limits on internet access, all of which inflate the real cost of a visit. Open economies wave foreigners through and let them spend.
Rich is not an economist. He is a former bookshop owner from Brighton who filed for bankruptcy before starting his channel in 2018. But seven years of filming every variant of post-Soviet bureaucracy has given him a sharper read on these costs than most government data offers, partly because most of these governments do not publish reliable tourism data in the first place.
What is actually happening
Rich's ranking, from worst to best, places Turkmenistan dead last. His reasoning is almost entirely economic. The visa application is a "nightmare." Tourists are forced to take "escorted tours," meaning a paid guide accompanies every step of the trip. There is a nightly 11 p.m. curfew. Most pointedly: "If you don't change money on the black market at the favorable exchange rate, then the country costs more than bloody Monaco."
This is not an exaggeration. Turkmenistan fixes its official exchange rate at 3.5 manat per U.S. dollar, a rate the central bank has held since 2015. On the black market, the actual rate is several times higher - reaching as high as 40 manat per dollar in 2021 according to reporting by RFE/RL's Turkmen service. At the official rate, a tourist exchanging 100 dollars receives 350 manat. At the parallel rate, the same 100 dollars buys more than 1,000 manat. Roughly 10,000 touristsvisited Turkmenistan annually in recent years, though one travel writer estimates the figure reached around 114,000 visitors in 2024 under loosening rules.
At the other end of the list, Rich crowns Belarus the champion. Belarus is in a strange spot. The country is under heavy EU sanctions for its role in supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And yet, in July 2024 the government waived visa requirements for citizens of 35 European countries, then expanded the list to 38 countries, then extended the scheme until December 31, 2026. According to Belarus's state news agency, 218,540 travellers entered the country under the visa-waiver scheme in 2025 alone. Total foreign arrivals jumped to 366,700 in 2024 from 233,128 in 2023, a 57 percent increase.
Sandwiched between them on the list are countries that have built entire tourism economies in the last five years on the strength of being cheap, easy to enter, and largely overlooked. Moldova, which Rich ranks second, is the clearest case. In 2019, Rich uploaded a video called Nobody Visits This Country... Find Out Why. It has 12 million views. In the year that video was published, Moldova received roughly 20,000 foreign visitors through travel agencies. By 2024, that number was 67,631, a 55.1 percent jump year-on-year. The first nine months of 2025 brought 480,700 visitors in total across all tourism segments.
The money trail
The economic logic behind Rich's ranking is consistent, even if he never spells it out. The countries he rates worst are the ones where the state extracts the most rent from the act of visiting. Turkmenistan's mandatory guides, hotel monopolies, and currency controls funnel tourist money directly into government-linked operators before any of it reaches an ordinary citizen. The country sits on the world's fourth-largest natural gas reserves and yet its central bank has run out of dollars to the point that cash currency exchange has been banned since 2016. Foreign visitors who arrive at the official rate are subsidising a state that cannot earn enough hard currency through its gas exports to its main customer, China.
The countries Rich rates best, by contrast, are the ones where money flows fastest from a tourist's pocket into a private restaurant, taxi or guesthouse. Moldova's tourism revenue in the first nine months of 2025 reached 4.2 billion lei, or roughly 232 million dollars at current rates, up 10.3 percent year-on-year. Inbound tourism alone generated 64.4 million lei - a 33.3 percent jump. The average length of stay for foreign tourists climbed from 3.9 to 4.6 days. The longer the stay, the more money lands in local hands.
There is also a more uncomfortable money trail running through Rich's own channel. His Moldova video has driven so much visible footfall that local Moldovan critics have accused him of misrepresenting the country for views, with one writer arguing the country shown in the vlogs simply did not match what she saw on arrival a few months later. The "Bald and Bankrupt effect" - a YouTube creator drawing budget travellers to economies that genuinely need the foreign exchange - has clear winners. Moldovan restaurants, hotels and the breakaway region of Transnistria all show up in his videos and then in tourist itineraries. It also has losers. Locals who prefer their country not be marketed primarily as a dark-tourism backdrop have very little say in the matter.
Russia, where Rich shot some of his earliest and most-viewed videos, sits at fifth in his ranking. The country has been closed to him personally since 2022, when he was deported after publicly supporting Ukraine. Western tourism to Russia has collapsed since the invasion, and the channel's most lucrative travel market is no longer accessible to its creator. The video he released today is, among other things, a substitute product for a country he can no longer film in.
What people are doing about it
Governments across the region have spent the last 18 months trying to translate this kind of attention into hard tourism receipts. Belarus extended its visa-free programme twice in two years and expanded eligibility from 35 to 38 European countries. The Belarusian Border Committee reports more than 1.1 million EU nationals have entered the country since the visa-free scheme began in 2022, with Lithuanians accounting for over 600,000 of those visits.
Turkmenistan is moving in the same direction, just much more slowly. The government announced plans to introduce an e-visa system in 2025 in an attempt to claw back tourism revenue lost during the pandemic. The official manat rate, however, remains untouched, and a Council of Elders member proposed in September 2025 to scrap cost-of-living salary increases for 2026 on the grounds that conditions are already "carefree." Inflation, by the same source, is running above 10 percent.
Moldova has moved fastest of all. The Moldovan government, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, expanded tourist accommodation capacity sharply through 2024, and the World Tourism Organization now ranks Moldova among the fastest-growing tourist destinations in Europe. Romanian and Italian tourists are doing most of the work, but a measurable share of new arrivals come from countries like Germany and the United Kingdom that match Bald and Bankrupt's core audience.
Travellers themselves have responded by building entire itineraries around the kind of content Rich produces. Forums on the post-Soviet travel scene now share black-market exchange rates for the Turkmen manat, tips for getting Tajik visas, and recommendations for which Moldovan villages can be reached by old Soviet trolleybus. The information arbitrage that Rich's channel monetised has, in turn, created secondary markets for guides, fixers, and homestays.
The bottom line
A travel YouTuber's ranking is not an economic indicator. But when 4.5 million subscribers watch a single creator spend seven years filming 15 closely related economies, the pattern in his preferences carries weight. Rich ranks closed, currency-controlled economies last and open, visa-free economies highest. That is not a personal quirk. It is the same hierarchy that shows up in foreign arrival statistics, in tourism receipts, and in the spread between official and parallel exchange rates. The 30-minute video published today is, for anyone willing to read it that way, a price list for the post-Soviet world. Turkmenistan costs more than Monaco at the official rate. Moldova costs almost nothing. The video does not tell anyone what to do with that information. The numbers, increasingly, do.
Timeline
- December 1991: The Soviet Union dissolves, creating 15 independent republics.
- January 2015: Turkmenistan devalues the manat from 2.85 to 3.5 per dollar and fixes the official rate, which has not changed since, according to RFE/RL reporting.
- January 2016: Turkmenistan bans cash currency exchange, formalising a divergence between official and parallel rates.
- June 2018: Benjamin Rich launches the Bald and Bankrupt YouTube channel.
- April 2019: Rich publishes Nobody Visits This Country... Find Out Why about Moldova; the video eventually reaches 12 million views.
- April 2021: The Turkmen manat hits an all-time low on the black market at 40 per dollar, more than 11 times the official rate.
- April 15, 2022: Belarus launches its first visa-free regime for select neighbouring EU countries.
- 2022: Rich is detained and banned from Russia after publicly supporting Ukraine.
- July 19, 2024: Belarus extends visa-free travel to citizens of 35 European countries.
- December 2024: Moldova records 67,631 foreign visitor arrivals, a 55.1 percent annual increase.
- September 2025: A Turkmen Council of Elders member proposes scrapping cost-of-living salary increases for 2026.
- November 2025: Moldova reports 480,700 tourism visitors for the first nine months of 2025.
- December 2025: Belarus extends visa-free entry until December 31, 2026 for 38 European countries.
- May 17, 2026 (today): Bald and Bankrupt publishes his final ranking of all 15 former Soviet republics.
Summary
Who: Benjamin Rich, a British YouTuber known as Bald and Bankrupt, with 4.5 million subscribers and 705 million views across 227 videos.
What: Released a 30-minute video today ranking all 15 former Soviet republics from worst to best, with Turkmenistan last and Belarus first. The ranking maps closely onto the gap between official and parallel exchange rates, and onto visa restrictiveness across the region.
When: May 17, 2026, marking the completion of a project Rich began in 2018.
Where: The 15 former Soviet republics, ranging from the Baltic states inside the EU to closed Central Asian economies like Turkmenistan.
Why: The video reveals, through a personal travel lens, how closed economies with fixed exchange rates and mandatory tour guides impose far higher real costs on visitors than open economies with visa-free entry. Belarus and Moldova, which have aggressively opened to European visitors, have seen tourism arrivals jump sharply. Turkmenistan, which has not, continues to charge tourists Monaco-level prices for a country with a 10 percent inflation rate.